Monday, 29 December 2014

Djanan hits her target on the last day of appeal

Djanan Turan performing at Cafe Cairo. Photo by Silvia Cruz

NEWS/UK

A Turkish singer who turned to
crowd-funding to help finance her new album has hit her target on the very last
day of the appeal. Djanan Turan had given herself a month to raise the funding
shortfall required to finish the recording of her new EP Maze. Her appeal on Kickstarter inched forward throughout December,
only passing the £4,000 target with just a few hours to go before the Christmas
Day deadline.

Hitmaker Raz Olsher to produce Djanan's new EP Maze

Nearly 100 backers pledged a total of
£4,007. Of these, 94 opted to receive a gift once the EP is completed early in
2015, with the remainder simply donating to help Djanan reach her target.

The funding means she can now pay for
the remaining studio and production time for Maze, as well as the mixing, mastering and printing costs of the CDs.
The talented singer-songwriter has employed Raz Olsher to produce her new EP. Olsher has previously topped the UK charts producing
Sam and The Womp’s hit song Bom Bom in
2012.

Given the nail-biting finish, we
asked Djanan how confident she was about reaching the target in time. She told
T-VINE, “Believe me I’ve got no nails
left! I always go for them under stress! I can’t say that I was confident. I
picked a very difficult time, which I realised only after I launched it.”

Having had an unsuccessful effort trying
to raise funding through PRS, she was not sure what to expect with Kickstarter:

“[The
fundraising] puts you in a weird psychology: you’re seeing the cup both half-full
and half-empty Things can get a little bit schizophrenic as the deadline gets nearer,
because it’s on an 'all or nothing' basis.”

Even though she spent a few weeks
preparing for her campaign, it was still hard to envisage the level of work
needed to keep the momentum going during her month-long appeal:

“It doesn't seem like it from the outside, but crowd-funding
is a lot of work. Setting up your campaign nicely and properly obviously takes
a while. Then the sharing! Seriously, I realised half way through how naive I
had been to think that you get this out, do your best to get the word out and
surely people will see it. It’s not like that. Everyday I’ve had to do emails,
tweeting, instagramming – I don't think you can ever really do enough. Yet you
don't want overdo it within the same group of people either.”

Now that she’s realised her funding
target, in the New Year Djanan’s focus will move to finishing the EP and delivering
the various gifts offered during her appeal:

“Every single pledge made me extremely happy, and I
felt extremely grateful. I now need to deliver the rewards. It will be fun and I’m
really looking forward to it. There are quite a few challenging ones, which
you'll see soon on Youtube.”

And her verdict on crowd-funding?

“Despite the work side, and the freaking out bit, I
loved it! I must say, I did struggle to properly keep up with the whole social
media thing, but this gave me a better grasp of it, and a nice pace that I can
carry on with. It’s connected me to loads of people from different times of my
life and the support has been soooo heart-warming, honestly. It’s not just the
money; I have received so much emotional support for the whole project, so many
lovely messages. Thank you all”.